NEA Monthly News Bulletin - February 2010

Radioactive waste management

The Decommissioning Cost Estimation Group (DCEG), a sub-group of the NEA Radioactive Waste Management Committee (RWMC) Working Party on Decommissioning and Dismantling (WPDD), is currently updating the standardised listing of cost items for estimating the cost of decommissioning, commonly known as the "Yellow Book". The two-year project is a co-operative effort involving the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Commission Directorate-General for Energy and Transport (DG-TREN). Important progress was made at meetings which took place in January in Vienna and Luxembourg. The output from the project will be a publication which will supersede the original Yellow Book published by the NEA in 1999. It is intended that the cost structure laid out in the new publication will lend itself to greater harmonisation of cost reporting, and will facilitate comparison and better understanding of different cost estimates.

Nuclear science

The NEA Working Party on Scientific Issues for Reactor Systems (WPRS) met at the OECD Conference Centre on 28-29 January. As well as reviewing the ongoing programme, delegates considered plans for activities over the next two years. Work will fall into four main areas: fuel performance, reactor physics, radiation transport and uncertainty analysis. Expert groups in each area will coordinate tasks related to the evaluation of experimental data and the analysis/testing of modelling methods. The WPRS also approved a proposal to undertake a new reactor stability benchmark based on an event at the Oskarshamn-2 power reactor in 1999. More details about the WPRS.

The NEA Task Force on Benchmarking Thermal-Hydraulic Loop Models for Lead-Alloy-Cooled Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (LACANES) met to discuss the results of the first phase of the benchmark, which is based on data from the HELIOS test facility at the Seoul National University in Korea. The first phase is devoted to the modelling of an isothermal steady-state forced convection case; the results of the exercise are expected to be published in the first half of 2010. A second phase of the benchmark will cover a non-isothermal natural circulation case. More about this activity.

Nuclear development

The 57th meeting of the NEA Nuclear Development Committee (NDC) took place on 27-28 January. Delegates reviewed the status of the current programme of work (PoW) before discussing and voting on the PoW for 2011-12. The NDC adopted eight new proposals for 2011-12, six relating to economic and data analyses and two to strategic and policy issues. There was again strong support for the "Red Book" on uranium resources and the "Brown Book" on nuclear energy data. Activities relating to medical radioisotope shortages and the update of the Nuclear Energy Outlook (NEO) are outside the regular programme and therefore addressed separately.

Data Bank

The NEA Data Bank is organising the following training courses and workshops: